Plastic Man

The New Yorker, September 17, 2001 P. 120

ANNALS OF DESIGN about designer Karim Rashid, 40… Writer tells about talking with him on a nine-hour flight between Milan and New York… Rashid is six feet four inches tall, and he was dressed in the white suit that he often wears on public occasions. Every time Rashid had surfaced in Milan during the previous week, his appearance had caused a stir. But here, among the businessmen on the airplane, he was just another unshaved and scruffy-looking designer… Along with all the work that had been commissioned in Milan, there was a tsunami of ongoing projects, including designing and building a hotel in Los Angeles, the Gershwin West, and another one, the Semiramis, in Athens, for the Greek industrialist Dakis Joannou. He also had an upcoming opening at Deitch Projects, in SoHo, where one of his concept pieces, Pleasurescape, would be unveiled… Rashid launched his career backward: he made his name by designing an eight-dollar plastic trash can, the Garbo, and a forty-five-dollar stackable chair, the Oh, and then used his credentials as a democratic designer, inheritor of the Bauhaus tradition of good design for the masses (which is one of the most enduring tenets of modernism), to get commissions for undemocratic design for the élite. In Milan, he showed a one-off furniture installation called Surfacescape: a four-piece, reconfigurable seating concept produced by Edra, an Italian manufacturer of expensive furniture… Rashid is technologically innovative, [but] in his relationship with the business side of his practice he is a throwback to Raymond Loewy, who once said that the most beautiful curve is a rising sales curve… Mentions that he taught at RISD, then at Pratt Insitute… Rashid has designed more than eight hundred things since 1993, and he has fifty projects going at the moment, everything from cosmetics to an "absolutely fantastic" project he was working on for a Swiss company called Golay-a line of jewelry with cultured pearls, which would rescue the pearl from the neck of the débutante… Mentions his design work for lighter company Ronson… The architect R. Buckminster Fuller accused commercial designers like Loewy of being little more than servants of advertising and marketing, engineers only of planned obsolescence, rather than makers of useful improvements for mankind. The same criticisms could be made of Rashid’s work… Rashid is an apostle of "soft tooling"-computer-assisted model- and diemaking technologies, which, when used along with CAD software, can drastically reduce the tooling costs involved in the creation of industrial products. Because manufactured objects are expensive to tool for-the average cost of making a die for a chair is three hundred thousand dollars-most products need to remain in circulation for at least five years if the producer is to make a profit. By making it possible for manufacturers to produce industrial objects more cheaply, in smaller batches, and to change the objects’ shape and color from one batch to the next without major retooling costs, the new technologies will enable industrial designers to cater to seasonal changes, as the fashion industry does. Writer tells about seeing Pleasurescape, a modular seating arrangement…

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